Tsk tsk
Dear Ma Bell,
I have two words for you, and they aren’t “happy birthday”. I have one word for you: sustainability.
This is a picture of my doorstep Monday night.
See those book thingies? They’re from you. It was really thoughtful of you to drop them off, but um…I didn’t ask for them. I don’t want them. I don’t need them. You wasted the “good surprise” on me. More over, I’m willing to wager the same sentiment is true for the hundreds of other people in my complex you assaulted with your paper wares.
Let’s do some quick math, shall we? Say my complex has 200 units. Yes, I’m being conservative, humor me. Say there are 43 such complexes within 5 miles of the city center (which there are, according to ApartmentGuide.com), and you leave two of these doorstops at each welcome mat. That’s 17,200 phone books, which makes you eligible for the reckless disregard for peoples wishes and the environment award of 2008.
Congratulations.
My sentiments exactly…
And to the Yellow Page Advertisers: I’ve never seen your ads and never will — the book goes straight to recycling. My neighbors have a different approach. They neglect to pick it up and let it turn into a pulpy driveway mess. I really don’t know anyone who uses them anymore. Reminds me a bit of those AOL disks/CDs/DVDs. How did that work out for them in the end?
I got a stack too. And just to give discredit where it’s due, the books we both received are from Yellowbook, "the largest independent publisher of yellow pages" — not the phone company. AT&T has digitized their books and made them available online, but I don’t know if they have reduced distribution of paper books accordingly….
My trash can was by the curb the day I got mine, so I was able to consign them to the landfill with maybe four seconds total of fuss/muss. Mine were in a plastic bag, adding to their ease of disposal and environmental deadliness. Yellowbook sucks. (That last bit is for search optimization purposes.)